2020s To Be A Decade of Disorder For Oil | OilPrice.com

The 2020s could be a “decade of disorder” for the oil markets as the lack of drilling today leads to a shortfall of supply. Demand will continue to grow, year after year, and shale will not be able to keep up.It may be hard to envision today, with an oil market suffering from low prices and a glut of supply. Falling breakeven prices have drillers still churning out huge volumes of shale oil, with production in the U.S. already rebounding and rising on a weekly basis.The tidal wave of shale, however, is the direct result of extreme market tightness a decade ago, which pushed oil prices up into triple-digit territory. The rapid rise of China and other developing Asian countries in the early 2000s put the squeeze on the market, as conventional production struggled to keep up with demand. High prices sparked new shale drilling in the 2010-2014 period, which, as we now know, brought a lot of supply online. That, subsequently, led to a price meltdown.“I think that what you might take away from this historical review, is that oil is volatile. We go through periods of stability, followed by huge increases, followed by the almost inevitable downturn coming off the big spike,” The former administrator of the EIA, Adam Sieminski, said on the Platts Capitol Crude podcast on April 10. But busts in the oil market tend to sow the seeds of the next upcycle.“And we’re in that downturn kind of age now. And everybody is kind of sitting around saying ‘well, maybe shale is going to make it different. Maybe we are going to be less volatile now because shale can feed into rising demand.’ I’m thinking that the decade of the ‘20s is going to be one of difficulties,” Sieminski said. “That’s why I call it the decade of disorder. We’re not getting enough capital investment now, I don’t know that shale is going to be able to do it all.”